As regions of the world go, Siberia is in serious need of a P.R. agent. To begin with, there's the climate. Siberia is the coldest place on earth. In the town of Oymyakon in 1928, scientists recorded the lowest temperature of any inhabited place—96 degrees below zero. That's a tough get-around for the guy writing the Chamber of Commerce brochure.
Siberia is best known for being a place people don't want to be sent. In popular imagination, it is a vast, remote, snowy realm dotted with inhospitable outposts populated by derelict soldiers and underperforming middle managers. At least part of that is true: it is quite large, and mostly empty. Siberia's land mass constitutes 10 percent of the planet, but is occupied by only 42 million people, exiles included. Good luck getting cell service.
None of which is to say Siberia is unimportant. Anybody who has played Risk knows Kamchatka must be defended at all costs. But there are other strategic, humanity-saving reasons to care about Siberia, too. For example, it might hold the key to preserving life as we know it.
Among Siberia's extravagant features—as Adam Wolf explains in colorful detail—are a continent's worth of dead but undecayed organisms that have been trapped in permafrost for thousands of years. These include a very large number of woolly mammoths, which once played a vital role in cooling the earth by trampling millions of trees. (You'll have to read the story to find out why.) The bad news: the permafrost may not be so perma after all. The top layers are beginning to melt and the organic matter trapped in the frozen ground is decaying. If this continues unabated, the massive “carbon bank” represented by eons of unrotted animals could unleash more CO2 into the atmosphere than all of the fossil fuels humans have thrown up in the past 100 years. The phenomenon already has produced a snapshot of what happens if the permafrost thaws: thousands of square miles of fetid, fizzing methane lakes. Wolf is one of the scientists trying to figure out how to stop that from happening.
Seldom do you find a tale that combines long-extinct species, enigmatic Russian scientists and repurposed army tanks (hey, read the story). Unlike most articles depicting the coming doom caused by climate change, this one has both heart and wit, along with the very serious science being conducted in one of the world's toughest environments.
Global warming has been more pronounced in Siberia than anywhere else on earth, leading to the trouble posed by the unfreezing ground there. It isn't all bad news, though, if you happen to live in Oymyakon. In January of this year, the coldest it got was 76 below.
